Above

by Roland Smith

  I took a right.

  “What’s going on?” Coop asked.

  Alex handed him a scrap of lined notebook paper.

  10:53. South. K

  “She was here!” Coop said.

  I looked at the clock on the dash. “Two hours ago.”

  “They are driving slowly,” Alex said. “Or else they stopped somewhere along the way before they got to the station.”

  “Why would they stop?” I asked.

  “Doesn’t matter why, or even where,” Alex answered. “We’re close enough to catch them.”

  “Except we don’t know what they’re driving,” I said.

  Alex pointed up ahead. “Turn around up there.”

  I got into the left lane and cut across traffic into the parking lot of an electronics store. I was going to drive straight through the lot and get back into the southbound lane, but Alex told me to park.

  “Why?”

  “We need a portable DVD player.”

  Alex tapped Coop on the shoulder. “Run in and buy one. And no screwing around. Pull one off the shelf, pay for it, and get back out here.”

  Coop didn’t hesitate. He jumped out of the car and headed into the store.

  “I better go in with him,” I said. “I doubt he knows what a DVD player even looks like.”

  I caught up with Coop just inside. Five minutes later we were back in the car.

  “Drive,” Alex said, tearing open the box.

  I merged into the southbound traffic, which was relatively light.

  “Perfect!” Alex said from the backseat.

  I had to keep my eyes on the road. I had no idea what he was so excited about.

  We passed the gas station where we had filled up.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “You didn’t notice all the surveillance cameras at the gas station?”

  Coop and I shook our heads.

  “Well, you better start paying attention,” Alex said. “There were six of them. Three outside and three inside.”

  “Do you think the Pod hacked into the cameras?” I asked.

  “Not the gas station cameras. It was a closed system. And even if it was open, I doubt the Pod have the time, or the ability, to keep a digital eye on their back trail while they’re moving.”

  “Then what’s going on?” Coop asked.

  “This,” Alex answered, holding up two shiny DVDs.

  I was confused. By the look on Coop’s face he was too.

  Alex rolled his eyes. “I swiped the station’s surveillance recordings for the past six hours,” he said slowly. “Kate was inside the gas station. She will be on these recordings. The Pod vehicles that stopped there will also be on them. We will be able to find out the make and model of the vehicles. We will also have their license plate numbers. Gas station cameras are usually set up so they can record plates. We might even be able to identify the drivers and passengers.”

  “Outstanding,” Coop said.

  “What happens when they find out their DVDs have been stolen?” I asked.

  “I doubt they ever will. No one looks at surveillance video unless there’s been a problem. I replaced the DVDs with blanks. And even if they did look, there is no way to trace it back to us. Our license plate and time inside the store is on these DVDs. We paid in cash. There is no record that we were ever there. Now can I take a look and see what we have?”

  Coop turned around in his seat to watch.

  I couldn’t watch because I was driving, and I have to say I was getting better at it with every mile I put on the odometer.

  “There she is!” Coop said. “Who’s that with her?”

  “Bella. It looks like she’s buying a box of oatmeal and paying for the fuel.”

  “Oatmeal?” I said. I desperately wanted to pull over and watch. “Is Bella in a wheelchair?”

  “She’s on her feet,” Alex answered. “But even without the chair it would be hard to recognize her from the photos the FBI is circulating. In fact, I’d say pretty much impossible.”

  “Kate looks like she’s laughing at something Bella’s saying,” Coop said. “She doesn’t look like she’s there against her will.”

  “Kate and Bella were pretty tight in the Deep,” Alex said. “Kate’s smart. We don’t know what she told them when they caught her in the park.”

  Kate was a great liar. I’d heard her tell some whoppers to her grandfather in the Deep, which he seemed to believe, at least at first.

  “Kate’s going into the restroom,” Alex said. “Off-camera. But let’s watch Bella and see what she does.”

  “She looks like she is guarding the hallway that leads to the restroom,” Coop said.

  “That’s exactly what she’s doing. See the door at the end of the hallway? That leads to the store’s office and storage room. That’s where I stole the surveillance tapes. They don’t lock it. There’s a back door in the office that leads to a small parking area. Bella’s making sure that Kate doesn’t slip away. They may be laughing, but Bella doesn’t trust her one bit.”

  “Kate’s coming out.”

  “Watch Bella as Kate walks past her,” Alex said.

  “Kate’s smiling,” Coop said. “She’s saying something to Bella as she walks by.”

  “Just watch Bella,” Alex repeated. “There! Did you see that? Bella glances down the hallway at the restroom and frowns. She wants to go down there and check it out, see if Kate left something behind, but she can’t without Kate getting out of her line of sight. Kate’s moving quickly. She’s already at the front door pushing it open. Bella has to follow. Kate’s playing her. And Bella’s playing Kate.”

  Alex started pointing out other Originals, what they were driving and how they had changed their looks. “There’s LaNae Fay. She’s a bad one. A Shadow like Kate and an Original wannabe. Except for the shaved head, she doesn’t look that much different. She does Larry’s dirty work. And there’s the Guard who confronted us in the Deep. I think his name is Carl. Not much they can do about his looks …”

  I tuned out Alex. It was too frustrating to listen to him without seeing the videos. To distract myself I started thinking about Kate.

  She didn’t know that we were getting her messages. She didn’t even know if we were following her. The guy she gave the note and journal to might not have trudged to the library in the snow for twenty bucks. We might not have been there. We might not have acted on it, or been able to act on it without a car and the snow falling.

  This got me thinking about faith and hope, two things Kate appeared to have in abundance. Coop had them too. Not in the religious sense. He simply believed in what he was doing. He had a path and was going to follow it wherever it took him, regardless of the consequences. This sense of purpose, or whatever you might call it, had taken him into the Deep, where he had met Kate.

  “Did you think all of this would be over when you found Kate in the Deep?” I asked.

  “What?” Coop turned back around in his seat.

  I repeated the question.

  Coop smiled. “Odd out-of-the-blue question. But I guess I did think it was over.”

  “Were you disappointed that it wasn’t?”

  “A little. I didn’t want to bring you, or Mom and Dad, into what I was doing. I should have known that you would come after me. And if you hadn’t, I would have probably been killed with a lot of other people. Kate could not have gotten me out on her own. You saved me, Lil Bro. You and Kate.” He glanced at Alex. “Well, I guess Alex too.”

  “You got that right,” Alex said. I noticed in the rearview mirror that he didn’t look up from the DVD. “They’re pulling out of the station. Kate is with Bella and Bill in the white Class C.”

  “What’s a Class C?”

  “A type of motor home. Cheaper than a Class A. Smaller. Some of the other rigs with them are Class A diesel pushers. At least thirty feet long. Engine in the back.”

  “No sign of Lod … I mean Larry?”

  “Nope. Not all of th
em stopped at this gas station, I’m guessing. And I suspect some of them stayed inside their rigs. Larry could have been in the Class C, but I doubt it. A Class C isn’t his style. If he has one weakness, it’s living large, even a thousand feet beneath New York.”

  I had been in the Lord of the Deep’s penthouse with Kate. And it was lordly, bigger, and more ostentatious than everyone else’s underground apartments.

  Alex continued. “If Larry was with them, he would be in the biggest rig, and he’d be in the one with Kate. She looks to be safe.”

  For now, I thought.

  salty oatmeal cookies.

  The Oregon coast, which would have been beautiful under other circumstances, streamed past the kitchen window at fifty miles an hour. Bill never drove too fast or too slow. He didn’t do anything to attract attention to our little home.

  “The smell of those cookies is driving me nuts!” he shouted back to us. “How about bringing a few up here along with a glass of cold milk?”

  Bill always did have a sweet tooth, but he’d managed to stay thin and fit in spite of it. Mostly because Bella had kept him in shape over the years with hours of aerobic exercise, weight training, and yoga, just like she had with the rest of us back in the Deep.

  Bella took two cookies that had cooled and put them onto a paper towel. She then poured a splash of milk into a glass, took a big bite out of one of Bill’s cookies, drank half the milk, winked at me, then carried what remained up to Bill.

  “What’s this?” he said.

  “Cookies and milk.”

  “You’ve taken a bite out of one of them, and you drank most of my milk!”

  “You’re welcome. I’m saving you from diabetes.”

  “I don’t have diabetes.”

  “And you never will as long as you eat only what I give you.”

  Bella sat on the armrest of the passenger seat so she could talk to Bill and still keep an eye on me in the back. I was lucky to be with her and Bill and not the others. I doubt I’d be baking cookies. Another batch was ready. I pulled them out of the oven and started sliding them onto the cooling rack. Bella and I had spent hours in the Deep baking cookies. We’d been pretty close. She had been almost like a mother to me. She and Bill had never had children.

  I looked down at the remaining dough. There was enough for three more cookies, which made me think of Coop, Pat, and Alex. I wondered where, and if, I’d be able to leave my next note. Were they getting the notes? Had they even followed me?

  Population 325.

  “No sea otters in Otter Rock,” Alex said. “In fact there are no sea otters in Oregon. The last one was killed just north of here in 1907. You’d have to go up to the northern tip of Washington State to find a sea otter, or down to Big Sur or Monterey in California.”

  I hadn’t even been thinking about sea otters. Alex, always the librarian, had been giving us little factoids like this the last several miles. (Or he’d been giving me the factoids because Coop was leaning against the passenger window sound asleep.)

  What I was thinking about was the cop car that had been following us two car lengths back for the past three miles.

  I’d wanted to pull over and let him pass, but Alex wouldn’t let me. He said it would be a dead giveaway.

  “There’s a viewpoint turnoff up ahead,” I said.

  “Forget it,” Alex answered. “You’re not exceeding the speed limit. You’re driving right down the center of the lane. You pull over, he’ll pull in right behind you, ask you how you’re doing, which really means, who are you and what are you doing? Since we can’t answer either question with any honesty you’re better off just driving on. You need to get used to having cops on your tail. His being behind us doesn’t mean he’s after us. It could be as simple as he’s going in the same direction as us. Cops are always behind somebody when they’re driving.”

  “What if he runs our plates?”

  “He probably already has. He found a perfectly legitimate vehicle with current tags, not stolen, and no outstanding arrest warrants. The reason I know this is because the cop up in Cannon Beach definitely ran our plates. If he’d found anything, he would have called us on it. You think the Originals driving the recreational vehicles are nervous about cops?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Absolutely not. They have ironclad fake IDs and friendly believable stories that would fool any cop on earth. Old age is the perfect disguise.”

  “What’s our friendly story? The lost wallet?”

  “That story’s used up. If we get pulled over, I’ll have to think of something else.”

  The clouds were gone.

  Blue sky.

  Clear and cold.

  Speed limit: 55 mph.

  The cop was still two car lengths back.

  It was like I was towing him.

  Waldport. Population 2,081.

  I slowed down to 35 mph.

  So did the cop.

  “During World War Two, this is where Camp Angel was located.”

  “Camp Angel?”

  “A civilian conservation camp for conscientious objectors. Mostly artists. Painters, poets, actors. They bunched them all together here for three years. Some of them claimed that their three years at Camp Angel were the most creative period of their entire lives.”

  Alex was old, but not old enough to have been around during World War II. “How do you know all this stuff? Have you been to Oregon before?”

  “Nope. First time. Don’t know why I didn’t come up here. I went to school in California, right next door. As to how I know all this, you forget that I lived in one of the best libraries in the country for nearly twenty years.”

  “I thought you just worked there.”

  “I lived and worked there. Of course no one else knew about the living-there part, which saved a lot of money. Once I had the Pod surveillance set up, there was plenty of time to read. That’s how I spent most of my time. I didn’t think I’d ever get a chance to visit the places I wanted to go to, so I read about them. Doesn’t cost a cent, and you don’t have to pack. There’s a restaurant up ahead. Pull into the lot. I need a restroom and something to eat besides tuna.”

  “But I thought you told me not to pull —” I glanced in the rearview mirror. The cop car was no longer there.

  “He turned off a while back,” Alex said. “When you weren’t looking. When you weren’t paying attention. You need to keep your eyes on everything all the time, just like the Pod. Maybe we should wake Coop.”

  “Nah, let him sleep.” I pulled into the lot. “Noon is his midnight.”

  “You want anything?”

  “I’m good.”

  “I won’t be long.” Alex headed into the restaurant.

  I walked over to a set of rickety steps leading down to the beach. I’d never been to the Pacific Ocean. Our family vacations had all been on the Atlantic. I wanted to at least touch the Pacific. We were more than halfway down the Oregon coast. The Pod could turn inland anytime. As far as we knew they already had.

  I took off my boots and socks and set them on the bottom step.

  The tide was out.

  The wind was up.

  I started across the cold sand.

  Halfway to the surf I heard, “Wait up, Meatloaf!”

  Coop ran to catch up with me. His pants rolled up to his knees, showing his pale and powerful tap-dancing calves.

  “What a difference a day makes! Cold but beautiful. Where’s Alex?”

  “Getting something to eat in the restaurant.”

  “I would have given him a tuna sandwich.”

  “That’s what he was afraid of.”

  “Ha.”

  Coop hadn’t bothered to put on a coat. His phoenix tat was bright in the sunshine, trying to wing its way out of his T-shirt. He ran down to the water and splashed through the foam.

  I joined him, but I was less enthusiastic with the splashing because the water was freezing. Well beyond the breakers were several fishing boats. A helicopter fl
ew south, low over the water.

  Alex shouted to us from the top of the stairs.

  “Race you!” Coop said, and started off before I agreed.

  He had done this in every race we had ever had. In spite of his perpetual head starts, he had never beaten me. Coop could tap, but I could run. I reached the stairs twenty feet ahead of him.

  Alex ignored us. He was watching the helicopter flying over the water. I put on my socks and boots.

  “I’ll drive,” Alex said. “You should try to get some sleep.”

  in the front seat before Alex swerved back out into traffic. I closed my eyes, but sleep wouldn’t come. It wasn’t due to Alex’s erratic driving, which had improved a little. It wasn’t because I wasn’t tired. I was exhausted. Every muscle in my body ached from driving tension. It wasn’t the constant clicks, buzzes, and crackling voices from the CB and two-way, although the sounds were annoying. Something else was keeping me awake. Something I couldn’t put my finger on.

  Yachats.

  Florence.

  Dunes City.

  Reedsport.

  Winchester Bay.

  Lakeside.

  North Bend.

  I’m sure Alex had interesting things to say about all these towns, but he hadn’t spoken a word since we had left Waldport. I thought he was concentrating on his driving, but that wasn’t it. He was listening to the chatter on the radios.

  Coos Bay. Population 16,000.

  “Turn it up!” Alex shouted.

  At first I didn’t know what he was talking about.

  “The CB! The two-way! The volume! The volume! Turn them up!”

  Coop snapped awake. “What’s going on?”

  I was fumbling with the knobs, trying to find the volume. Alex pulled the car to the curb and slammed on the brakes.

  “Can someone tell me what —” Coop asked.

  “I heard Larry’s voice,” Alex explained, trying to unclick his seat belt. “I couldn’t tell if it was on the CB or the two-way.”

  I finally found the volume buttons on both units, but it did little good because no one was talking at the moment. Although someone had been talking when Alex came unglued. A man, but he sounded like every other man jabbering over the radio for the past hundred miles. Where to eat. Traffic. Speed traps. I had tuned out the conversations because they were giving me a headache.